Today, I saw this tweet from Tory Anderson:
I just experienced #emacs rectangle-mark-mode for the first time, though I’ve been using rectangles for a long time. This allows me to make a rectangle easily even when neither first nor the last line are the longest. Nice! pic.twitter.com/yGVjxWNiWz
— (webdev “Tory”) (@Endless_WebDev) March 7, 2022
It reminded me that I used to use it all the time and thought I even had a shortcut for it but when I called describe-function it said there was no binding associated with it. I searched my init.el and found that it was actually defined as part of a hydra dealing with rectangles.
I was happy to rediscover this and am writing about it in case some of you may have forgotten about it too. In a sense, it doesn’t really bring anything new but it does make it much easier to visualize the rectangle and how the text will be affected when you issue a command on it.
I stole the hydra from this post by abo-abo. The thing with rectangles is that most of us don’t use them enough to burn the keystrokes into our muscle memory, so the hydra is really useful. Of course, you still have to remember that you have the hydra and what its keybinding is. Something not all of us, apparently, can do.